WOODLAND, California — Elyse Doyle-Martinez grew up in Woodland always believing she would become a professional athlete and aspire to compete in the Olympics. She participated in various sports throughout childhood — it was her way of "fitting in." However, many years later, Doyle-Martinez instead found herself creating silkscreen art and murals as a tool to empower youth and explore topics of identity and sociopolitical movements.
It wasn't surprising, though. For as long as Doyle-Martinez could remember, her dad was adamant about her becoming an artist. He often laid out pencils and pads of paper for her to sketch on.
"He was a major influence from a young age. And as I got older, my family as a whole... were really the ones who got me out of my shell," said Doyle-Martinez.
Doyle-Martinez graduated high school in 2006 and played basketball at Sacramento City College. After two years, she transferred to California State University, Northridge and majored in Gender and Women's Studies with a focus on Chicano Studies. She said at that time, she wanted to know more about her family's history and her Indigenous roots in México. That's when she found silkscreen art and her calling for community activism.
"That was really where I started to get more of a background on Chicano art and artists in different movements. And that's when I started to see that silkscreen was a primary medium for a lot of those artists," said Doyle-Martinez.
Years later, she carried her passion back home to Woodland, where she continued learning about silkscreen art at Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer (TANA). TANA is a collaborative partnership between the Chicana/o Studies Program at UC Davis and the greater Woodland community that offers a Chicano/Latino Arts exhibition space and teaching center, among other services. There, Doyle-Martinez worked under the mentorship of Malaquias Montoya and Carlos Jackson, artists and co-founders of TANA.
Much of Doyle-Martinez's works have reflected farmworkers' or workers' rights and have been inspired by prominent civil rights activists César Chávez, Dolores Huerta and Larry Itliong. Chávez and Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW), and fought for better pay and safer working conditions for farmworkers. Itliong organized for the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), which joined forces with the NFWA for the Delano Grape Strike and Boycott, recognized as one of the most important social justice and labor movements in American history.
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Doyle-Martinez also gets inspiration from her own family.
"Growing up, I always, you know, heard about my grandma working in the cannery and a lot of her family working in the fields," said Doyle-Martinez. "I think that's a history that a lot of us in California, a lot of brown people in California, can relate to because we can all kind of point to that person in our family who worked in agriculture and worked in those fields to provide something better for us."
Doyle-Martinez said she still recognizes the challenges farmworkers continue to face today.
"Workers are still dealing with so many adversities in the fields... To see generations now that are still coming and still planting seeds of just hope for the future generation is really beautiful to watch and something that I want to continue to advocate for and celebrate," said Doyle-Martinez.
Today, she is using art to work with youth. She is an advisor for Brown Issues, a statewide youth leadership development organization focused on cultivating the next generation of brown leaders through healing, civic engagement and narrative change.
Between 2019 and 2020, Woodland experienced a series of shootings and community violence. Doyle-Martinez said she saw the impact on youth firsthand and knew she wanted to invest back into the community with mural art. Primarily, she wanted to change the way youth in the community were negatively perceived.
"They get a bad rap. They go to these schools, these continuation high schools. They've been pushed out of every other school they've been in and they're seen as the bad kids... and after hearing that over and over throughout their 16, 17 years of life, they start to internalize it," said Doyle-Martinez. "What has helped with that is really looking at art that reflects them, their culture, where they come from, meeting people who come from the same backgrounds that they do, and getting to interact them with professionals."
In 2022, she started running Cache Creek High School's Student Support Center, which offers students a space to work quietly and get help on assignments. But most of all, it's a space for students to build community. More recently, the students wrapped up mobile mural installations for the Yolo Farmworkers Festival to celebrate farmworkers. Doyle-Martinez said many of them have either worked in the fields themselves or have family that still do.
When asked about what influences Doyle-Martinez to continue her work, she immediately points to her own mother.
"Just hearing the stories about teachers and counselors discouraging her when she was younger, just a first-generation brown woman wanting to go to college and wanting to pursue what she wanted to do with her life... It makes me think about the young people I'm working with now and how they're the first generation to go to college or the first generation to even graduate from high school," said Doyle-Martinez.
In addition to helping students find their passions, she strives to also embed important Chicano history.
"It wasn't always a requirement across the board so a lot of young people ended up losing out on the history of the Chicano movement, and that kind of takes out that piece of identity for them," said Doyle-Martinez. "And so being able to reteach that, whether it's through my own art or through the art of other artists in the area, it's something that I've been able to use as a way to communicate what it is to be Chicano."
Doyle-Martinez said she finds her work especially important in Woodland, and she hopes to put her hometown on the map for art.
"There are Chicano artists in Woodland, there are older murals and there are murals at all of the elementary schools and throughout town. There's art history, Chicano art history here in Woodland that just hasn't maybe made it onto the big scene yet," said Doyle-Martinez. "For young people who don't have that at home, I think these spaces are being created for them to go explore and that is huge."
Doyle-Martinez and her students will showcase a special mural installation for Día de los Muertos through TANA on Oct. 28. The installation is part of the City of Altars program, an altar-making program in collaboration with local artists that is run by the Latino Center of Art and Culture in partnership with several other organizations. The mural will honor young lives lost to community violence, suicide and fentanyl.
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